


cosmic hero

by arbitrarily



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Canon-Typical Everything, M/M, Parallel Universes, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:06:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24718003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He drove through a war. Now he can't get out. He's in a fucking astrophysical cul-de-sac.
Relationships: Brad Colbert/Ray Person
Comments: 20
Kudos: 112





	cosmic hero

**Author's Note:**

> Time is a flat circle: the fic. 
> 
> In all seriousness, everything I know about quantum mechanics and the multiverse theory/theories has been gleamed via idle late night "I can't sleep" internet poking around, which is to say––everything I know is really nothing, lol. This is all (very) dumb fiction and I am very much so not a scientist. And in the spirit of (very) dumb fiction, everything post-canon here is fudged or made-up (barring Brad and the Royal Marines.)
> 
> Warnings for anything canon might need to warn for, but especially language and attitudes towards, well, any and everything (with some extra internalized homophobia thrown in.)

The detonation makes the road ahead buckle before it erupts. A blinding cascade tears upward, but then their victor’s airborne and any sense of up and down, much like the situation itself, is absolutely fucked. 

Even with the helmet Ray’s head, and by extension his brain, rattles hard enough to threaten something vital loose. Makes his vision blur, but then maybe that’s on account of the humvee, now flipped onto its side. The sky is bright and open above the driver’s side window and Ray blinks up into it. Below him, his right arm has gone numb down to his fingers. Bad fucking news. He smells burning fuel, that particular stink of blown and torn-up earth and dirt, concrete and hard-traveled road. And blood; he can smell that, too. 

He turns his head, not nearly as slowly or carefully or however you’re supposed to move after an IED has sent you first up then down and now sideways. Beside him Brad doesn’t look so much like a human man as a crumpled pile of woodland camo. 

Ray keeps moving, even with his right arm limp and useless, tucked against his side like a clipped wing. The steering wheel, the fucked radio equipment has him penned in but good, but he still reaches. 

The same two words keep clanging in his head, beating like a metronome steadier than his heart. _Brad’s dead Brad’s dead Brad’s dead_. His hand shakes as he grabs for the closest part of him— _Brad’s dead_ —the familiar material of his MOPP rough beneath his hand, dirty and bleeding, and he pulls, he tries to roll him towards him, he’s a heavy motherfucker, and the acrid taste of bile rises up his throat, burning everything else here—and—

Ray’s chest heaves and he opens his eyes. A crooked ceiling fan circles precariously, cutting through the light pollution coming in through his open bedroom window and the open plastic blinds. A semi lays on the horn as it takes the ramp onto the freeway. His t-shirt is damp with sweat. “Goddamnit. Not again.” He can still smell the desert.

He doesn’t know when it started. It was after his discharge, he was already outside, he knows that much. He wrote the first few occurrences off as nothing more than bitch-ass nightmares. Fucking visceral manifestations of that barebones “Marines Don’t Commit Suicide, Just Homicide” faux-PTSD PSA Mr. Potato Head barked at them once they were back stateside. 

And that would’ve been normal enough. Ask any of them and they’ll tell you—Marines are already fucked in the head; some real “you can’t unscramble scrambled eggs” logic in play (another feature of another, different, Sixta lecture), so if he’s fucked, he's fucked. What else is new.

So they were dreams until they weren’t. They’re not dreams. He knows that much now. He can do things, he can make things happen, there’s an element of control always absent from dreaming.

He doesn’t know how to explain it any more than this: he goes to bed in his shitty one-bedroom apartment and he wakes in the AO. Each time, he’s greeted with the same eerie familiarity, horror waiting beneath the mundanity, his heart hammering mainly under the influence of caffeine and no sleep. It’s him, he’s himself, he’s living a life that’s his but also very much so not. It’s Iraq, all over again—the same shit, different clusterfuck. They’re not memories he’s met with; there are always details that are off enough, an uncomfortable wrongness, though never in a dream-like logic-defying sense. Garza is still their gunny as they approach Baghdad. Reporter isn’t in the humvee. Captain America got fragged and they only speak of him past tense. 

And Brad. Brad keeps dying. Fucking visceral unholy shit that lives on his eyelids and in his brain even after he’s awake. Ray’s never seen a gas attack, not in person and not up close like that, yet here one is, stuck indelibly in his memories now, Brad’s face discolored and bloated and very much so dead. 

The way Ray’s figured it, he’s a hitchhiker, plopping down each night inside another Ray’s head. He’s a fucking Russian nesting doll, one tucked inside another inside another. He contains fucking multitudes. He’s still working out the finer details. Theory-development takes time and skill. Trial and error. But he’s sure of at least one thing—he isn’t dreaming. This shit is really fucking happening.

“Sometimes yous think you don’t know yours own minds-uh. But yous _do_.” Sixta, again. Ray really needs to find a better voice to hector his inner thoughts.

“No. No country.”

“ _—life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze—_ ”

“Ray. I. Said. No. Country.” Each of Brad’s words come out staccato like buckshot, a completely wrong rhythm for the song.

Ray pounds out the correct tempo against the steering wheel. “ _Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong_.” He hits a truly impressive caterwauling warble on the final syllable.

“Stop. That is a direct order, Corporal Person.”

“Goddamn, dude. It’s not country, it’s John Denver. John fucking Denver.” He pauses, considering. The sun is too bright; it reflects funny off the dirty windshield. Contributes that much more to the heightened feeling of both surreality and this-shit-is-really-happening. “How much coke you think he was on when he wrote that one?”

“Immaterial. I ask very little of you—”

“Uh, that’s definitely not true.”

“—but I think even a mouth-breathing degenerate such as yourself can understand and follow one simple rule: there will be no country music in my humvee.”

“And you have the audacity to call yourself a man. Fine. May this speak to your fragile homosexual sensibilities instead.” Ray clears his throat before he launches into a high falsetto. “ _You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest, like the mountains in springtiiiiiiiiiiime, come fill me again_.” In the backseat, Reporter is laughing. In his peripheral vision, he can see that crack in Brad’s offended armor that’s most definitely the start of a smile.

Ray keeps singing. By the time he hits, “ _Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms_ ,” Brad’s belting it right along with him. 

Ray can’t decide if this is a memory. If this is his, or if it belong someplace else. To someone else. As he drives, he tries to believe it doesn’t really matter.

So it’s manageable. That’s what he tells himself each morning he stumbles disoriented out of bed and each night he drags himself, slowed by dread, back into bed. He can live like this. 

He’s tried workarounds. He’s tried to reason with these doppelgänger versions of the people he already knows. Brad, mainly, when he’s not dead or dying. He tells him things like, 

“I’ve fucking been here already, I’m supposed to be at home;” or, 

“Do you think I’m gonna have to watch you die this time? Because I’m getting really pretty sick of it, homes, if I’m being honest;” 

or, the one time, he chants over and over again, namely because it worked for Dorothy in Oz, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” only to no avail;

“This isn’t real, I know this isn’t real, this isn’t real, I know this isn’t real,” he tries that the next night, but before Brad can say anything about that he goes and gets himself toasted by an ambush RPG team. 

Tonight, Ray tries to force the thought _wake up_ into his head. Like maybe if he tries hard enough he can get back to his bed in Missouri and back into his own body. Instead he yells it out loud—“Wake up!”—wild and vaguely furious, his hands braced against the top of the steering wheel. 

All he gets for that is a sidelong glance from Brad. His face is wearing that patronizing expression that’s equal parts mockery and the Lone Ranger, man-in-command up on his high horse. 

“Am I going to have to confiscate the Ripped Fuel, Ray?”

“Don’t you even try it,” he mumbles. He cups his face in his hands from forehead to chin, as if it’s a mask he could take off if he really wanted to.

“What?”

Okay, so, maybe it’s not entirely manageable.  He calls Brad up after he wakes from a particularly brutal night. The clock radio beside his bed glows a green _4:36_. He’s more than a little surprised he actually answered.

“Hey, great, you’re still alive.”

There’s a long pause. He can hear Brad moving around on his end of the call. It’s reassuring, it counteracts the vividness of where he just came from. It’s still there, the shit he’s seen, poking at him. Demanding more attention. Burning in front of his eyes, one gnarly afterimage.

“Any reason I shouldn’t be?” Brad finally says.

“Beyond the built-in fallibility of the human flesh you currently occupy? Nope.”

“Fuck that. I’m infallible as shit.” There’s a spitting sound. Running water. He’s brushing his teeth. It’s cool he still has those, since last Ray saw him he didn’t have a lower jaw anymore. 

“Sure, if you say so, pal. Well, I’m glad you’re not dead and all, but I got my own shit to do.”

“Ray, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, but masturbation does not qualify as an actual agenda item.”

“That’s just because you’re doing it wrong.”

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

It’s a hospital. The chair Ray’s sitting in is some ugly plastic-chrome hybrid that’s uncomfortable as fuck. The hospital windows are right in front of him, the length of the wall behind the bed between them. They overlook a base. Even from this distance he can recognize and pick out the humvees lined up. Tents shiver in the wind further out. There’s nothing else, flat desert, everything glowing red with either sunrise or sunset. No other identifying features, not from a topographical standpoint. He could be anywhere. He knows he’s not.

It’s fucking Iraq. 

Brad is in the bed. He looks more corpse than anything else, greenish pale beneath the tan he’s earned. There’s nothing recognizably wrong with him, which Ray knows means there’s something majorly fucked. He rubs the heels of his palms against his eyes hard enough to make his vision sparkle and fuzz.

He slumps back in his chair, his tailbone twinging. He glances around the room in the name of situational awareness or just plain old curiosity. Some futuristic shit up in here, way outside what he knows to be the Marine Corps’s stingy budget and actual tech capabilities. Couldn’t get them fucking batteries, but they’ve gone ahead and built a military hospital that would make Michael Bay weep with joy. 

There’s a complicated-looking monitoring system displayed on a shiny flatscreen above the bed. Brad’s heart, the beat and the blood pressure low, snake at a crawl across the top of the screen. Below that is some insane-looking Operation game-like graph charting his entire body and its insides. The screen has his spine lit up red along with his neck, and, yeah. He was right: it’s all real fucking bad. 

He looks back at Brad, as if verifying the human map. He’s still. Unmoving. 

This is new. Not the damage-to-Brad part, but the location. Each night, it’s been the humvee. It’s been mid-mission. It’s Baghdad, the desert, it’s night and he’s on watch. He thinks he might be dangerously close to unspooling something that feels a lot like infinite possibility, for lack of a better term, and that’s scary as shit. This may be Iraq—and he knows that, deep in his bones the same way he knows who he is and who Brad is—but it’s no Iraq he knows. 

“Ray?” Brad interrupts his increasingly panicked thoughts. His voice sounds like it was dragged over rough road, gravely and weak and fucking ugly.

Ray lifts his head. “Yeah, hey, man.” Brad’s eyes are open, just barely. There’s a minor twitch to his top lip. Nothing else about him moves. “You really fucked up this time, huh?”

All he gets is a queasy tilt to Brad’s mouth. 

“I’m no expert,” Ray says quickly, desperate for anything but the quiet, the electronic beeping ensuring Brad’s not dead yet, the rush of the ventilation system inside a hospital that looks more like a spaceship about to take flight. He wants to wake up. He’s never going to get this out of his head. “But I’m guessing you should probably be sleeping.”

Brad’s mouth hardly moves when he speaks. “You’ll still be here when I wake up?”

Ray’s stomach plummets; he feels sick. “Yeah, man. Sure.”

He stops sleeping after that.

That’s gotta be the solution, right? He can’t travel if he doesn’t go to sleep. So he’s not going to sleep anymore. Instead he binges on enough Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and black coffee and five-hour energy shots to probably give himself an ulcer but it also keeps him awake, and that's great. He finds a sheaf of old graph paper in the kitchen cabinet alongside a couple cans of pinto beans and he gets to work. He starts charting what he knows. This shit is at its most manageable when there’s something to be solved. Figure out the circuit and what goes where and what it does, and you get shit running. And this right here, it’s sphinx-like shit, where maybe if he can guess the answer— _which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?_ —he’ll be admitted to Thebes or the maze or the kingdom of heaven or whatever sphinxes guard, whatever’s being guarded from him now. Maybe all of this will finally stop if he can make sense of it. The problem with that is an obvious one: some shit’s just never gonna track. How man theories did he float in the AO at Reporter about why they were even fucking there? None of those tracked either, because when you got down to it, when Ray finally said fuck this and walked, he saw it for what it was. There was no reason. There is no reason now. 

He’s just fucked.

The better part of a long weekend passes like this, Ray making like the Unabomber, his apartment converted into a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, sheets of paper scattered all over his apartment, an order that barely makes sense to him. He sketches out some cosmic design of either existence or fate or neither, and he’s a beat away from taking up a sharpie and writing on his windows, going full-on cinematic genius if only for the aesthetic. 

He makes the mistake of laying down on his back in front of the TV. It’s on, but muted; about four hours ago NASCAR gave way to some old golf tournament from like 1999 ESPN’s re-airing, and Ray figures if he can skip around in time and space, then ESPN can too. He lets his eyes close for a brief moment. A windshield is in front of him. He opens his eyes. Tiger Woods, sunshine, green. Some bitch in a polo shirt offering a prim little round of applause. He closes his eyes. There’s a crack in the windshield right in front of him. If he follows that line, he knows where it leads, he can smell it. Just like dead men, men who get shot have a stink to them too. He opens his eyes. Crumbs are embedded in the carpet fibers; he needs to vacuum. He’s so fucking tired. Not even OIF strung him out this bad. He scrubs his hands over his face, his eyes shut again, and Brad’s dead. Of course he is. His eyes are open and so’s his mouth, parted slightly, almost amused, like he can’t believe this shit either. Or he couldn’t believe it. He’s got a hole in his throat and he’s bled out down the front of his MOPP.

“Motherfucker,” Ray mutters, his eyes open and gritty. He makes a snap decision. He does the one thing that makes even more sense than not sleeping.

He goes to see Brad.

“Hey, man. Long story short but you mind if I crash here? Thanks.” He’s been in his car for the better part of twenty-four hours, driving west, sleep deprivation a high all its own. Now, Ray pushes past Brad into his house. 

Brad turns to face him. He closes the front door behind him, each movement from him deliberate and regimented, like he just caught Ray mid-fuck-up and he’s cycling through a list of potential consequences, best-case scenario to worst. 

“I do mind. This is my house.” He looks Ray up and down with obvious distaste. "You wanna give me the long story?”

Okay, bluff called. Ray drops his sea bag to the floor. “Wanna get some tacos first? I’m starved as a motherfucker.”

They get some tacos. 

“You look like absolute shit. I assume you know this.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ray says, his mouth full. “It’s sweet talk like that I’ve missed most about you.” He swallows, takes an even bigger swallow from his beer. “Yo, so, I’m just going to go ahead and say it. I’m being Freddy Kruegered, every fucking night. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I’m not the one getting it. It’s more like Freddy Kruegered by proxy, I guess.”

“I’d prefer you kept your perverted, filthy, whisky tango sex life to yourself.”

Ray snorts. He picks at the damp label on the sweating bottle of Modelo in front of him. Ray’s sweating, too. Tweaking. Even now, if he closes his eyes, the dusty road begins to rise in front of him, the windshield dirty and bug-flecked, cracked, between them. 

He sighs. Looks across the table at Brad. “Alright. Not to sound like an outright homosexual dick-suck or anything, but what do you dream about at night?”

Brad stills, a half-eaten taco held up to his mouth, the contents threatening to slip out, his head tipped to take a bite. Ray always did enjoy that, the few times he was able to say something so unexpected or bizarre it made Brad Colbert take a beat. “I’m not even going to dignify that question with a response.” He takes a messy bite.

“What? Iceman doesn’t dream? Of course not, your suit of armor probably comes equipped with a tinfoil cap to keep out the electro-static interference that would create an adequate REM cycle sequence for you.”

Brad wipes at his mouth with a napkin. “Is that really how you think REM sleep works?”

Ray squints into the sunshine. He left his sunglasses back in his car, parked on the curb outside Brad’s place. They’re sitting outside at a cheap taco place in LA. Some hot sauce has managed to find a crack in Ray’s dry lips and it fucking burns.

“What if I told you some real weird shit’s been happening to me when I go to bed every night?”

“They’re called nocturnal emissions, Ray, and all it means is you’re growing into a big boy.”

“Fuck off. I’m being serious. This doesn’t have anything to do with my dick.”

“For once.”

“I go back to Iraq every night.” He says it quickly and abruptly, the same way you rip off a band-aid and pray the scab’s not coming with it. “Every fucking night. You’re there. Usually you’re alive, but most nights lately you wind up dead. And before you start probing me, anally or via skull-fuck, it’s…” He doesn’t know what the fuck it is, and that’s the problem. “Y’know, at first? Homes, I thought it was just a metaphor. Some poetic-ass, gay as all hell Robert Frost, two roads diverged kind of shit. This is how it could’ve gone. Only, it’s not two roads, it’s, like, two million to the infinite power. And I’m thinking, okay. Maybe the metaphor’s for Uncle Sam, y’know? Some American imperialism shit, like we’re always gonna go in boots on the ground and make a bigger mess than what we found in the name of apple pie and democracy and Ronald Reagan’s ghost—”

“You sound like a goddamn communist.”

“—but that’s not it either. It’s—it’s personal. Like,” and he pauses again. He really wishes Brad wasn’t wearing sunglasses. He’s an unreadable motherfucker on a good day, but right now it’s like trying to divine meaning off a blank sheet of paper. “You go to war, but you never come back. Not really. That’s the metaphor. Only now, I get it. It’s not a metaphor. It’s real. I’m gonna keep repeating different versions of the same fucked shit every night in Iraq until I, I don’t know. I die. And then, depending on your religious or moral persuasion, I’ll really have to pay for it.”

“You think you’re paying for it now.” It’s not a question, just that usual Brad commanding-officer tone. 

“Fuck that. No. I know what this is, and you should, too.”

“You say MKUltra, and I’ll end not only your current existential crisis but the mortal one you’re stupid enough to refer to as a life.”

Ray rolls his eyes. He works the inside of his bottom lip with his front teeth, makes it sting again. Brad hasn’t technically shut the conversation down, and there’s a part of Ray that’s pretty damn sure he’s only humoring him, the same way he would in the front seat of their victor, nothing but time instead of hajjis to kill. Brad hasn’t done a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna believe him. It’s fucking stupid how bad Ray wants him to believe him. 

“I’m not explaining this right. Okay. Let’s try this one more time. I’m gonna use my words and I’d ask you to use your brain plus your ears.” Ray starts from the beginning. Every night is the same in that every night he’s in Iraq. He tells him that at first he was just like, whatever, fucking weird, but who doesn’t have disturbing-ass dreams sometimes, he’s not a pussy, he can live with it. But the problem with that analysis, and it’s a pretty big problem, is that he’s 99.9% positive that these aren’t actually dreams. Ray knows what it feels like to dream but he also knows what it feels like to drive—he’s pretty goddamn good at it—and he knows what it feels like to sit behind the wheel and be expected to steer and maneuver. That’s what those dreams—which definitely aren’t dreams—feel like: he’s plunked down behind the wheel of a Ray Person who is very much so not him, experiencing some wild shit he most definitely did not already live through.

Brad doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “You’re describing dreams, Ray.”

Ray groans. He collapses back into his chair only to immediately spring back up. He leans across the table towards Brad. “I know what I’m describing, and they’re not fucking dreams.” He falls back again. “Who the fuck do you think you are anyway? Sigmund dipshit Freud?”

“Then enlighten me.” He watches Brad lick sauce off his fingers, a quick flash of teeth as his mouth opens. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Dude. Parallel universes.” Brad’s eyebrows lift, and Ray’s pretty sure that behind those glasses all he would find is more blank incredulity. “I’m gonna ask you one more question, and I want you to be straight with me. How much do you know about quantum mechanics?”

The answer is _not fucking much_ but far be it for Brad to admit to such a flaw. What he knows is about the equivalent of what Ray knew—you could thank _Mythbusters_ reruns and some astoundingly astute scientific pondering from a bored Q-Tip back at Mathilda—before that weekend he took a first-caffeine-and-then-gas-station-legal-amphetamine-fueled deep dive into any and everything he could find (and understand) on the web. There are a lot of real smart motherfuckers out there, theorizing about aliens and parallel universes and shit. Ray’s been cooking up a theory of his own, and it both relates to whatever the fuck is happening to him each time he goes to sleep _and_ why they were even in Iraq. Once he cracks this, he’s gonna have to get Reporter on the phone.

“No one’s getting anyone on the phone, except for me, procuring you an escort to the funny farm.”

“‘The funny farm’? Speaking of space-time and potential inter-dimensional travel, what year do you think it is, old man?”

They’re back at Brad’s place, drinking in his backyard. Brad’s leaned back in an old lawn chair, all legs and torso, and, well, arms, too. Ray is pacing in front of him. His eyes have that crackly feeling where they’ve been open too long but also like they’re itching with dust. He rubs them, regrets it, drops his hands just as quickly.

“Do I need to explain to you how the world was made, Bradley? I’ll give you a hint—like all creation myths, it involves banging.”

“Far be it from me to interrupt what you might call a straight line of thought, but what does that have to do with anything you presume to be talking about?”

“Okay, fine, right. Too far back. You want me to tell you how much I know about quantum mechanics?”

“Sure, let’s hear what they taught you in your backyard barnyard classroom, Ray. May you have learned as much as the pigs.”

Ray doesn’t even hear him—he’s in the zone. “So, there’s a bunch of different theories out there in play, seeing as how it’s the universe and it’s vast as fuck and if we understood it then we probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now, but. Ergo.” He pauses for dramatic effect.

“Is there…more?”

“Ergo,” Ray repeats, undaunted. “We don’t know what the shape of space-time is, not exactly, so one theory is that space-time is flat and it goes on and on and on for fucking ever. And because it goes on forever, you have an infinite number of universes, right? But the particles? They can only be put together so many ways, so the universes start repeating themselves. Okay? Cool, sure. So you wind up with these parallel universes, where there’s a fucker same as you, but then there are other universes that differ by, like, one particle’s position or whatever.” Brad’s mouth is tight and his eyebrows are raised, there are lines creased into his forehead, and his arms are folded over his chest. Doubt is all but pouring off of him, so maybe Ray’s not really doing his research justice. He clears his throat. “Our universe could be just one of gazillions of parallel universes that branch off from each other, nanosecond by nanosecond. But here’s the thing—they’re never supposed to intersect or communicate. Enter me, I guess.” He pauses. “That’s Everett’s many-worlds theory. I learned that on the Wikipedia.”

“Well, if the Wikipedia says so.” There’s a wry twist to Brad’s mouth that isn’t exactly a smile. Like he knows Ray’s deliberately downplaying both his research and his intelligence. “So what’s all that supposed to mean, for your supposed condition?”

“Christ, you make me sound like a fucking limp dick pharma ad. ‘Your supposed condition.’ It means,” he says, shifting tracks effortlessly, “that, like, all possible outcomes are out there, happening in some other world or universe. I left my notes in the house,” he nods towards Brad’s backdoor, “and I’m tired as fuck and probably conflating some shit that’s not meant to be conflated, and I left out even more shit I don’t fully understand, not yet, but you’re free to look up decoherence and quantum superposition and wave function collapse on your own time. The gist of it is though there are infinite parallel worlds to this one. Like, there’s a world out there where you and I are having this conversation, but somewhere in here I choose to say fuck instead of motherfuck, or, like, you stand up and get all tall and tell me to leave.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Brad doesn’t move though, he’s still reclined, his beer held loosely in his grip. Like this is any other evening they’ve spent together in his backyard and not, instead, whatever this is. “Leave, I beg you.”

Ray ignores him. “But there are even more, fucking infinite worlds where we never have this conversation. The outcomes don’t lead to it. We get up to totally different shit.”

“And now you visit those worlds in your sleep.”

“Exactly! Only, infinity is somehow bound by motherfucking Iraq. And, I shouldn’t even be able to get to them! No one should! Emphasis on the word _parallel_ , dog.” Ray takes a seat in the empty lawn chair opposite Brad. There’s an empty fire pit between them, the faint scent of burning still emanating from it. He feels slightly calmer than he has in weeks. “See. It doesn’t sound that fucking wild when you say it.”

“You’re demented. And deranged. And if I thought even for a second you don’t actually believe every word leaving that inbred mouth of yours.” Brad doesn’t finish the thought. His eyes are fixed on Ray. Despite the mild relief, Ray’s starting to doubt himself. Not about the space-time, parallel universes shit, but Brad. Maybe Ray was wrong. Brad’s not behaving like this is any other night, not really. There’s obvious tension in how he’s holding his body, a faint hint of exasperation in the downturn of his mouth. Ray’s pretty sure from repeat experience that’s what worry looks like when Brad Colbert wears it.

“Not to bring the party down, but I regret to inform you, you die in most of these worlds. Like, grisly fucking exits. Dude, I’ve seen you dead a whole fuck-ton.”

“Lovely.” A spark of genuine curiosity lights up Brad’s face. “What happens when you die?”

Ray finds out within the week. 

Brad lets him crash at his place. He lets him stay in the spare bedroom next to the laundry room and the door that leads out into his garage. The room’s nice, in an anonymous bougie suburban asshole kind of way. There’s nothing really of Brad in here, but then that’s true of the rest of his house. He keeps a folded treadmill in the corner collecting dust, some free weights tucked into the closet. Random, well-organized shit—a filing cabinet in there and beside it a safe. Ray should’ve planned a heist.

And it’s like old times, except for how it’s not. It’s California, Ray’s a civilian, he can say, “fuck off,” when Brad says, “PT,” at the ass-crack of dawn, dressed and ready in a pair of running shorts. 

It’s the same at night too—old times, but not.

Tonight Ray’s caught without his flak vest. He’s only there for what feels like minutes, less than an hour, easy, before everything goes to hell. Before he takes a hit to the chest.

He wakes as he falls out of bed, his body heavy, gasping and gagging. The pain is still there, unlike anything he’s ever felt before. He futilely paws over his chest, but there’s nothing there, just a threadbare old Black Flag t-shirt. He gags again, sounding like a cat with a Guinness World record-sized hairball. He pukes this time, all bilious liquid, and he can’t stop shaking. He lays on the floor of Brad’s mostly empty guest room and wills himself as close to still as he can get. 

The door opens, a crack of light widens until it falls over him. Ray groans. It’s his head now that feels cracked open and raw. He screws his eyes shut; there’s nothing waiting for him on the other side. Somehow, that might be worse. 

“What the fuck is this.”

“Jesus, turn off the fucking light.” He flails his hands. Ray’s voice sounds strangled and fucked-up, which is apparently, absent superior command, how you get Brad to obey without question. The darkness feels better and Ray drops his hand down to his side. He steadies his breathing, or he tries to.

“I’m fine,” he manages to croak.

“ _Fine_ doesn’t get my ass up at 0400.”

“I didn’t get you up, that was of your own volition, man.” Each word takes a stupid amount of effort, even though Ray’s pretty sure there’s nothing actually wrong with him. Not this Ray. He’s Ray. Default Ray. Prime Ray? He’s gotta learn the terminology. 

Brad looms over him. Eyes still closed, he can feel him. He doesn’t say anything, and Ray is finally able to crack his eyes open without feeling like his head is going to split open to match the busted ribcage and the gaping chest wound he left behind. 

“You wanna know what happens when I die? I fucking puke on your rug.”

Brad doesn’t say anything for what feels like a very long time. He just stands there, in only a pair of plaid boxers. He looks like a fucking giant from down here, prone on the floor, but to be fair there are very few times he’s not giant as fuck as compared to Ray. Ray takes a deep breath in, reminds himself that that’s something he can still do. His hand drifts back to his chest, where it takes very little effort to feel where the bullet entered him. He prods at the flesh beneath his t-shirt—intact, solid, even when in his mind it’s the very opposite.

Brad finally speaks. “There’s carpet cleaner in the cabinet above the washing machine.”

Ray offers a weak thumbs up. “Awesome.”

He’s decided to blame one of the other Rays for this. There’s a mad scientist version of himself that was maybe, like, trying to figure out how to make an army of Ray clones or travel through time or blackholes or both and maybe he fucked up or maybe he’s a genius in all universes, known or unknown, and he totally meant for this to happen. The why of it all keeps tripping him up, but maybe the Ray Person he is is too far removed from mad scientist levels of dope intelligence to fully get it.

“So what you’re saying is you’re too dumb to explain this.” Brad is washing dishes. Ray is picking at leftovers. He sits perched on the edge of the countertop despite Brad’s strict prohibition against it. They’ve settled into an easy, unthinking domesticity that isn’t all that different from how they were in the field together—short of the sheer amount of amenities currently enjoyed and the lack of military hierarchy and dumbfuck orders.

“Fuck you, that’s your takeaway from all this?”

The dishes clang against each other in the basin of the sink. Brad wordlessly nods towards the dishtowel, tells Ray to pick it up when Ray doesn’t move. Ray licks his fingers, scoots off the countertop and away from the leftover ribs, does as he’s told. He starts drying. 

“In your dream-walking—”

“Travel through infinite parallel universes.”

“—have you ever run into yourself?”

Ray goes still, his face screwed up. He shakes his head. “I don’t think it works like that. I just hijack the other Rays.”

Brad pulls the stopper in the drain but he doesn’t take his hands out of the dirty dishwater. “Do you think…” Even in profile, Ray can see Brad’s face dip down into one of those frowns he knows all too fucking well. It’s the _I don’t like what’s about to happen and I like even less how powerless I am against it_ face. As Ray knows it, it’s usually directed at command, at the situation, rarely Ray himself. Brad turns his head to look at him. “Do you think you get hijacked too?”

Ray blinks. He can’t believe he never thought of it.

“What the fuck. Like I don’t have enough to worry about.”

Like clockwork, he devolves into a panic, total fear that maybe Brad’s on to something here. That he’s been hijacked too and he doesn’t even know it. That’s a real fuck you to the whole personal autonomy thing a man’s supposed to have, your decisions and your actions maybe not even your own. That’s also the U.S. Marine Corps, but that’s a rant for another, better day.

Though to be fair, despite the panic—intermittent now rather than constant—these have been better days for him. He’s more grounded here, at Brad’s, which is something he’ll never admit out loud, not under pain of death, actual or parallel. It’s dumb, but it helps. To be able to wake up, confused and adrift, and to hear, to know, Brad is here, elsewhere in the house. Stealth as a motherfucker despite the fact he’s built like a live oak. The tight pull of his mouth as he asks each morning, “Sleep well?”

Still, Ray starts to keep a log. Just in case. Just so if there is a gap, he can point to bodysnatchers. There never is any gap.

“ _Ray_.”

Night, and he’s supposed to be digging a grave. Or he’s supposed to jump in one. The humvee sits behind him, the interior dark. He can hear Trombley snoring in the backseat, Reporter beside him meeting him on the off-beat. 

The desert is cold enough Ray's breath fogs up in front of him when he exhales. He can see Brad approaching, a tall shadow that grows ever taller as he comes closer. 

“I know you have the mental capacity of a high fructose corn syrup-addled toddler, but I am talking to you.”

Ray frowns, completely serious. He's been playing around with an idea, in his actual and waking hours, that he's gotta treat these nightly visits as actual recon missions. He's gotta gather some actionable intel. And here he's been, going about this assuming each and every one of these universes are operating on the same fundamental basics like a goddamn amateur. “Hey, homes, what year is it?”

Brad steps towards him. When Brad reaches for him, there’s a brief moment when Ray thinks maybe he’s going to check him for a head injury. His hand cups behind his neck and his thumb briefly rubs at the base of his hairline. Easy and almost gentle, if there’s anything Brad does that could actually be quantified as gentle. But that’s not really fair, is it? There’s a ton of shit the Iceman is gentle about, it’s just Ray’s too smart to ever call it that. That’s self-preservation, probably.

“You make me very tired,” Brad says, his voice any other adjective but gentle. He says it like a good thing though, like something familiar you could hold or pet, and not for the first time but for wholly different reasons, Ray knows this universe-hopping thing is going to actually kill him.

He gives Ray’s head a rough shake before he leans in. Brad’s forehead bumps against his, and then he holds them both still, pressed to each other. It could easily be some regular devil dog shit, except it’s not really. It’s affectionate, it feels real, and of course it does, it’s happening to him right now. But it also feels like it could be a memory of his own, exactly something he can envision the Brad he knows, the one he knew, the Brad he deployed with, would do to him. It’s like putting tracing paper over a real picture and recreating it by your own hand—the same, but different.

Brad pulls back from him just as abruptly. “Get some sleep, Ray. I got watch.”

“New theory.”

“Jesus.”

“No. Hear me out. What if we never left? What if _this_ is the mindfuck and not, y’know, all the rest of it. Like, in reality? You and me? We’re sweating our balls off in two-week-old MOPPs and playing grab-ass for the last jalapeño and cheese.”

Brad takes a deep breath through his nose and his nostrils flare. He doesn’t move and he doesn’t say anything. He just sits there, frozen, his spoon weighed down with thick oatmeal threatening to plop back down into the bowl.

“Did I break you? Did I finally do it?”

“I beg of you, Ray. Shut the fuck up.”

“It’s ‘cause you think I might be on to something, that’s it, isn’t it? Ray really gets this shit, that’s what you’re thinking.”

“On the contrary. But if I am going to engage with the detached gaping blackhole you call a mouth even and despite the excrement that falls out of it, I need, at the very least, one cup of coffee first.”

“Cool. I’ll wait.” There’s a pause for as long as Ray can contain himself. A manic grin starts to spread across his face. “Hey. Hey, Brad? Blackhole? Blackhole, Brad? You are buying into this astrophysical shit, aren’t you—goddamn, I got you!”

Brad dies less often now, so that’s pretty tight.

Ray is definitely not courting any cause-and-effect theory on that front. 

He doesn’t know where the fuck they are. Desert, obviously. Iraq, duh. The platoon's parked, and he’s bent over, working with Brad on last-minute humvee repairs.

Somewhere in the innards, this ancient wreck they call their ride, Brad cuts his finger. He hisses, pulls his hand back. Ray peers over his shoulder—it’s not very deep; blood has pooled but has yet to spill from it. 

There’s no real thought to it, which is definitely something more than a few somebodies would say is Ray’s standard M.O., but Ray reaches and he bends. He pops Brad’s finger into his mouth. He can taste the blood, hot and metallic and inappropriately, grossly, personal. He can also taste dirty skin, the cloying grease of motor oil. He looks up at Brad with big eyes, his hand loosely linked around Brad’s wrist. Brad is looking down at him, squinting. There’s an unquestionable sense of permission here, both violated and granted. The both of them are hidden from the rest of the platoon by the popped hood, the sort of privacy that isn’t, brief and easily broken.

Brad extracts his finger. A string of spit first connects Ray to Brad and then dribbles down his chin. 

“Do you have any idea how much bacteria is in the average human mouth, let alone your diseased whisky tango trap?” Totally normal Brad shit to say, but there’s a strange heat behind it. Not anger exactly, and definitely not outrage. Like edging too close to something dangerous and irrevocable and definitely combustible. 

Ray wipes at his chin with the back of his hand. Brad’s still watching him. He feels over-warm and unbalanced, even as he snipes back at him. “Where’s that warrior spirit of yours, huh? Out shopping for penicillin?” 

There’s a long pause of nothing that’s not really nothing. The sun beats down on them and Ray’s back is slick with sweat, aching from hunching over the humvee for so long, even if, mentally, existentially, cosmically, he just got here. His new strategy is just to roll with this shit. Operate solely on instinct, like an animal. He’s been doing that the last few nights, and it’s not that it’s easier, it’s not that it’s better, but it hurts less when he doesn’t think. When he doesn’t think of this as anything other than real. This is real. He’s hot and he’s dirty and his eyes are red-rimmed and bleary from the kicked up sand. Brad is looking at him, and that’s real, too. 

Brad springs into action abruptly, back into the guts of their victor. “A warrior’s spirit is nothing unless the body it occupies is maintained in peak physical condition. I don’t expect the runt of the litter, left roadside…” Ray rolls his eyes as Brad continues to talk, casual invective thrown out in a kindly mocking tone. For lack of anything else to do, Ray gets back to work, too.

New theory: it’s a duplex. One house, two tenants. Just because Ray’s there, that doesn’t mean he’s canceling out the other Ray. They're just jointly occupied.

“But it’s the parallel thing again, dude. I can’t reach him and he can’t reach me, but somehow we’re, like, working in tandem inside the same mind.” 

Brad brushes past him. He’s still wet from the beach, his wetsuit folded down at the waist like he’s molting, and Ray trails after him, his laptop held haphazardly in one hand, gesturing wildly in spite of it.

He follows Brad into the bathroom, still talking, barely pausing for breath. Brad fixes him with a look. The linoleum tile is cold under his bare feet and Brad hair’s still wet enough he has the ocean dripping down the side of his neck. He raises his eyebrows. “You mind?”

“Yeah, what, sure,” Ray says. He sits down on the toilet, he turns back to the webpage he left open. He starts talking again. Brad stands over him. He releases a long-suffering sigh, and then he’s reaching for the shower. Water spits on with a start and Brad undresses quickly and mechanically, like they’re back in the barracks, in the field, and not his bathroom.

Ray doesn’t stop talking for a second.

He’s in a grave.

There’s rustling coming from the grave next to him, the rough, dry drag of friction. The sound of skin on skin. And he knows exactly who it is, if only based on the unceasing rhythm and the steady even breathing behind what he knows to be clenched teeth. It’s the patented Brad Colbert combat jack.

He wouldn’t have thought anything of it, before. He didn’t think anything of it. You got hard-up, both in combat and out of boredom. You got away with a lot of shit when you were in the suck. It only got weird once you were on the outside. When you got back to civilian life and most shit you wouldn’t’ve blinked an eye at took on a new dimension. He’s trying very hard not to let this take on a new dimension. He is trying not to think anything of it, though maybe he’s not trying hard enough. Beside him, now, Brad's picked up the pace. That much closer to the finish. He imagines what it would be like, if the same thing was to happen in the real world. Brad, a couple feet away on the couch. Just whips it out, starts jacking off.

Fuck, maybe Ray’s overestimating them. Maybe that wouldn’t even be that much of a deviation from their SOP.

Ray knows one thing for certain now: he took it for granted that all these other Rays in all these other universes had the same relationship to Brad that he does. 

He’s really failing on the recon front, because this Brad is shoving this Ray back against a wall like he means business and the only thing Ray can feel is surprise. Okay, intrigued surprise. Ray vaguely recognizes it as that abandoned cigarette factory outside Baghdad. Ray holds himself very still, which is a fucking feat consider the way his blood is galloping through his veins and he’s hyped up enough his teeth are all but vibrating.

Brad’s face is amused. Fuck, maybe it’s even fond. “Don’t tell me, after day after day of teasing, now that I got you alone, you’re gonna play hard to get.”

And what the fuck. Ray laughs, nervous—he's fucking nervous, fuck him. 

“Maybe I like to be wooed,” he hears himself say. 

Brad calls him out, and of course he does. Even here, Brad’s thigh thick and all muscle pressed between Ray’s, they’re still Brad and Ray. 

“I know what an unprincipled, vice-ridden deviant such as yourself likes, and there’s nothing sweet about it.” And Brad’s touching him now, this Brad touching this Ray, a firm grip low on his hip. His other hand is just as tight along the bend of shoulder into neck. If it's possible, he presses that much closer to Ray, the bulk of him flush tight against Ray, covering him. 

“What the fuck,” Ray breathes against the dip in Brad’s throat. You think you fucking know a person. He says that out loud too, and he as much feels as hears the quiet laugh that Brad barely offers up. He’s already giving him more than enough, he doesn’t have to humor him, too. Ray sways towards him, into him, the sound of his mouth wet as it parts open even though he, for once, doesn’t say anything more. Which is a good thing, because Brad’s dragging a hand down the front of Ray’s fatigues and anything he might’ve had to say would’ve been incriminating as fuck. 

Instead it’s Brad who’s doing the talking. He tells him, his voice as amused and as nearly fond as his face, everything he would do to him if they had the time (and, arguably, if Ray had the stamina; Brad seems to have a lofty and aggressive view of what Ray's dick can actually take.) Ray jerks into his grip, already leaking into his skivvies and Brad’s hand.

This is some stolen valor kind of shit. That’s what this is. The Other Ray Person, the Ray who lives in a world where it’s entirely likely and actually possible Brad Colbert would want to stick his hand down his pants and look at him with an expression on his face that says he’d also like to stick his tongue in his mouth and if didn’t have to divert half his attention to make sure they don’t get caught he would, should be reaping all this dick-based soon-to-be-come-stained glory. He’s become a voyeur in his own goddamn life. He hopes the other Ray, in whatever fucked cosmic arrangement is happening here, is also aware of what’s happening. Because that’d fucking suck otherwise.

Ray would want to know. 

The next morning, for the first time maybe ever, he finds it hard to look at Brad. He had thought, maybe, it’d be hard to reconcile _that_ Brad with _this_ Brad, but it’s way too easy. Like when you go to the eye doctor and the dude keeps switching the lens and asks you which one is better and there’s not enough of a difference worth commenting on. Shit like that. Because his hands are the same, borderline alien huge and he doesn’t even have to use his imagination now to picture what they’d look like, feel like, for one of those hands to cradle his head, grab at his hip, pull him closer. Take his dick into his fist and make him come into it. 

He wastes his time wondering about dumb shit, like if all Brads would touch him the same or if that’s another universe-dependent construct and if it’s something he’ll ever get to find out in his own world. He can’t decide if this is better or worse than all the theorizing he did before. On the one hand it’s infinitely less existential but no less terrifying, makes him squirm in a way that’s both frustrating and exhausting. 

It’d be cool to say this was never anything this Ray wanted. What he wants. Bulletproof plausible deniability, one less thing to worry about. Most effort anymore has gone to figuring out what the fuck is even happening to him to even bother with it. 

“Hey, where the fuck are you?”

Brad. Brad Actual, slumped low on the couch, interrupting Ray’s—silent, mercifully—unending stream of consciousness.

“Uh. Right here. Clearly.”

He wants it. He wants him. Goddamnit.

Ray isn’t talking. Neither is Brad. He drives. He waits to wake up.

“Mom and Dad are fighting,” Trombley says with the same interest he typically reserves for dead dogs and a broad and forgiving ROE. It’s quiet enough, Brad still glowering beside him, that Ray can hear Reporter’s pen scribble across the page.

It’s the middle of the night and he’s in Brad’s kitchen. He must make enough noise because it draws Brad out. Brad doesn’t say anything, not at first. He goes to the cupboard and gets out a glass. He goes to the sink and fills it up. He turns to face Ray.

“Bad dreams?”

“Fuck off.” 

"Someone's cranky," and how's that for an apocalyptic fucking understatement. 

“Yeah. Yeah, maybe I am. You don’t know the half of it. The shit I've fucking seen? Might make a man just a little 'cranky.'”

“Oh, he knows things now. Hail the prophet Ray Person.” Brad carefully sets his glass of water down on the counter behind him. Across from him, Ray glares. He wants to fight him. He thinks he’s wanted to fight him maybe forever but definitely since he melted what was left of his mind back in that cigarette factory, in a timeline that’s not even theirs to share. 

“You don’t believe me? Okay. I know what your hand on my dick feels like, you asshole, in case you were wondering.”

Brad’s face does this crazy thing that would be really funny any other time, but it’s like time lapse photography or some shit, only on speed. He rifles through like eighty different emotions, sixty-percent of which Ray’s not entirely sure he can name.

“Is that a challenge or an invitation?”

“Not in the slightest. Just thought you might want to know, even in alternate dimensions time and space you’re still a cock-hungry faggot.”

“Are you trying to goad me?” Brad pushes off from the counter. He’s doing that full height intimidation thing he’s really fucking good at, towering over Ray like it would take very little effort to devour him or kill him or fuck him. All of the above. Wouldn’t even break a sweat. 

“Nah, I’m not trying to get anyone’s goat, least of all yours. I’m a Recon Marine. I’ve been fact-finding. Consider this the sit-rep.

“You were a Recon Marine.”

“Past tense, present tense, today, tomorrow, tomato, toe-mah-to—time’s nothing but a fucking optical illusion for me right now, man. Is the following image a clock or a gaping asshole?”

“Ray.”

“You get it? Because I’m legit getting fucked by time here.”

Brad’s got him caged back against the countertop. The edge of it’s cold even through Ray’s t-shirt, makes his skin feel the opposite—hot. Tight. Ray has to crane his neck to look up at him. 

“What is it you want me to do with you?” And that’s not at all, not even close, to what Ray expected Brad to say. A fucking litany of responses are on the tip of his tongue. He swallows. For once, he goes the safer route.

“What do you wanna do with me?”

“Most days? Strangle your sorry ass.”

Ray scoffs. “Go ahead and fucking try.”

Brad kisses him instead, and it's a slow-motion car crash, a fucking nuclear implosion, slow like he’s letting Ray decide whether or not he wants to destroy the world. Their world. He does. He lets Brad kiss him and he kisses him back, as total and impossible, incompressible as to be death-adjacent. 

None of the other Brads had ever kissed him. He’s inexplicably violently grateful for it. Brad kisses him roughly, sincere and deep but quick, his body stooped over Ray’s own. A fidgety, anxious energy trips up his spine and down his arms, makes his fingers jerk to touch, so he does. Digs in to Brad’s sides, his bent elbow, the jut of his shoulder blade. He’s solid, real. 

Brad’s hand grabs at his hip, but rather than feeling like a copy of a copy, it feels the same as he does against him: real. Brad reaches under Ray’s t-shirt and he drags his hand down over the harsh cut of Ray’s hipbone, beneath the low-slung waistband of his boxers. Ray’s teeth sink into Brad’s bottom lip and Brad shoves against him. He’s hard too, he can feel him, heavy and thick against Ray’s opposite hip. 

When he finally gets a hand on him, all of Ray twitches, tweaks, like there’s a live wire sparking between his teeth. It feels vital, again unmatched from the other night, back in Iraq. Brad’s hand moves with quick, brisk confidence over and around his dick. And Ray knows, he fucking knows, instinctive and private, that Brad’s touching him the way he likes to be touched. He’s jerking him as he would himself, something so stupidly, catastrophically hot about that it makes Ray both want to squirm out of his grasp and crawl tighter into it.

They have two things here they never had in Iraq, and that’s time and privacy. Brad doesn’t hold back, so Ray doesn’t either. He goes all in—pathetic, needy noises he doesn’t mean to muffle against Brad’s shoulder, but his mouth winds up wet and open there anyway until Brad gets a grip at the nape of his neck and pulls his head back, as if demanding to hear him.

The only thing he has left to say is _fuck_ and Brad’s name.

“Ray. I’ve been fucking looking for you.”

He can feel his mouth pull into a grin, face dimpling with it. He’s crouched down by the humvee, early morning. He’s so fucking tired.

“Right where you left me, homes.”

Soon Brad will be gone. Not forever, but for long enough. It’s a metric Ray uses these days: not forever, but long enough.

He joined the Royal Marines, some real bonafide dumbassery right there, if you ask Ray. Brad doesn’t, but Ray tells him anyway.

“That’s some real bonafide dumbassery right there.”

It's early morning, and Brad's already been out for a run, sweat still damp on his skin. 

“Well, maybe in my next life I can choose differently.”

Not funny. Not fucking funny at all. Ray feels his mouth curl and twist, the rest of him still, rooted as if ready to throw down. “Sure, yeah, I’ll ask the Brad I run into tonight what his post-OIF plans include, how he feels about the Queen and crumpets, if he wants to lay back and think of England. Though, you know, anything is possible. Maybe in that world there isn’t even a fucking England and he'll think I'm a total psycho.”

There’s a similar stillness to Brad, just like when they used to be on the road, one or the other or both pissed, fighting without actually saying the words that would make it one.

“Goddamnit, Ray. I can’t do this anymore.” Okay, so maybe they are saying the words this time. Brad’s mouth is tight enough it’s amazing sound can even leave it. “There are no other worlds. There’s only this one.”

Ray gapes at him. “Uh, have you listened to a word I’ve said for the last month, or?”

Frustration is obvious in Brad’s face, his cheeks pink with it. He’s still tight and controlled though, even as he rubs at the back of his head. Even with the twitch at the corner of his jaw. “Do you need help? Like actual help? I went along with…all this, because, I don’t know, I thought maybe that was what you needed. But now,” he shakes his head. 

“Fuck you. I’m not crazy. I’m not off my nut. I’ve never been more on my fucking nut, dude.” He’s hurt, and he didn’t expect that. That sucks. That really fucking sucks. Something cracks open in him that feels a lot like the truth. “I know it’s real, okay? It’s all real. It’s all fucking real, even if it’s getting harder and harder to keep shit straight. I can’t keep it straight. I mean, the death and the destruction—dude, I got that, I can parse that shit the second I open my eyes and you’re there and you’re alive and I’m—it’s the rest of it. It’s—I can’t keep _you_ straight, which Brad does this and which Brad wants that and which Brad likes to fuck me and which one loves me, because, yeah sometimes you love me and sometimes I love you back, and I can’t just,” he ducks his head, self-conscious and nauseous and already planning the route he’ll drive halfway across the country back home. 

“They’re all me though.” Ray lifts his head at the deadly way he says it. Fatal, yet oddly warm. 

“Uh, come again. What.”

“You ignorant, maladapted, tunnel-visioned shit-for-brains. Mr. Mad Scientist here, and you still don’t get it. You tell me each night you hop from parallel universe to parallel universe and the only constant in it is me. There are no different Brads. They’re all me.”

This is the thing he always underestimates about Brad. Iceman to the fucking frozen core, but of the two of them, and of most people he knows, whatever outward performance of stoic masculinity John Wayne desert cowboy shit aside, he’s as in touch with his emotions as Rudy. Must be nice, to know yourself like that. All Ray’s got is loud static on the best of days. 

“You vainglorious motherfucker,” Ray says, more than a hint of awe to his voice. He’s hit with the same sudden clarity that comes with being high as fucking balls, when you think you can if not see then punch god. Brad isn’t wrong. In fact, he’s probably fucking right. The one obvious answer staring Ray right in the face he refused to look at. Like driving down a dark road in the middle of the night, NVGs stuck to his eyeballs, no depth perception, a fucked understanding of his place in the road and the world. Mistake what would be obvious for something else. The shoulder becomes the edge of a cliff, a fallen tree an abyss cracked open. There aren’t multiple Rays—they’re all him. It’s a loop, and it repeats. And it’s always him. It’s always Brad. 

A grin spreads across his face. “Christ, you sound like a Disney prince come to fuck Snow White in the mouth.”

“Would you please shut yours?” Before Ray has a chance to reply, Brad is clutching his chin. He presses his thumb over Ray’s lips. He leans in.

It doesn't stop. That’d be too easy. Ray rolls with it a little better, thinks of it now more as a hamster running on a wheel and less as inter-dimensional travel without a passport.

Tonight he wakes, shaking. Wait, it’s not his body shaking, but his body being shaken. There’s a hand at his shoulder, jarring him roughly, a lot like how their victor took to the rough deep-dark terrain. It’s Brad, his hand covering the curve of Ray’s shoulder entirely. Ray’s drenched in cold sweat, and, yeah, maybe he is actually shaking, the comedown from a spike in adrenaline. 

“You were yelling,” Brad says, which Ray doesn’t think is exactly necessary.

He yawns. “I do that sometimes.”

Ray, without thinking, curls his hand into the front of Brad’s shirt. He pulls him down to him and Brad goes willingly, but then that’s really the only way Ray can get Brad to do anything: willingly. His weight’s heavy, familiar, a deja vu-like sensation that makes his head feel loose and his mouth dry.

“What if I am? You know? Actually certifiable. Like, president-assassinating, grab the strait jacket, gonna-start-eating-people, just, fucking insane.”

“You’re not. At least not any more than usual.”

“Comforting.” And, okay. Maybe he isn’t crazy, and maybe it’s like this: survival is always gonna be a horror story. Some things, maybe, you don’t get out from under.

Brad settles heavier against him, like he means to if not subdue him then he’d be fine with crushing him.

“You know, you can’t go anywhere if I’m holding you down,” Brad says, quiet and hot against Ray’s ear. There’s a word or there’s a phrase for what this is, Ray’s pretty sure of it. Some French shit. _Pas de deux_. No, wait, that’s ballet. _Folie a deux_ , that’s it. Brad’s as fucking crazy as he is.

Ray grins despite it, his mouth hidden against the warm and bare curve of Brad’s bicep. He has Ray’s head in his hand, like he can hold that together too, but, fuck, maybe that’s what he’s always done. He’s just getting real tactile and literal about it now. Ray can’t say that’s necessarily a bad thing; he’s into it. 

Ray lets his eyes close. At first, there’s nothing. And then, over there, his eyes flicker and he can start to make out shapes in the dark desert. He opens his eyes again, looks up at Brad.

“You’ll still be here when I wake up.” It comes out sleepy and already halfway gone. He’s not sure if he means it as a question or not. It’d make for a pretty lame-ass question if it was one.

Brad is warm and steady against him. He hears him when he speaks, somehow both at an impossible distance and close enough to touch his skin. 

“Where else would I fucking go?”

It’s a beautiful fucking morning In Iraq. Soon, Ray knows, they’ll be northbound towards Nasiriyah. He’s done this before. He’s done this many, many times. Behind the wheel of their victor, Ray sits, baking in the sun. Waiting. 

Brad throws himself into the passenger seat, practically giddy.

“We’re oscar mike. The invasion's begun. Boys, let’s ride.”

Ray turns over the engine. “Jesus, you’re so moto right now I think I’m gonna puke.”

Brad grins. “Ray,” he says. “Just drive.” So Ray does.


End file.
